As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server with FreeBSD
How to update FreeBSD with freebsd-update
Anytime you set a clean fresh FreeBSD install or just any other operating system you must update it. This should be the first thing. If you are a bit security aware (read paranoid) you can first set up the firewall rules and then update the system to the latest release where you have all the […]
Abandon Linux. Rolling back the entire OS is possible.
When I was writing an article on updating FreeBSD from the 11.2 version to the new major release number 12, I was trying to add something extra for those who may read some of the information I publish. FreeBSD as a UNIX operating system has similar functionality to the old school UNIX ones such as […]
How to replace a disk on a ZFS mirror pool
It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, it’s happened more than one million times and it will still happen in the future. You run out of disk space or a disk fails. Nowadays you are using ZFS, and instead of having a fancy RAIDZ, because you still don’t need it, you are using a […]
How to enable SSL on Apache on FreeBSD
On this guide you will read about a simple way to enable Apache’s TLS connections on your web server. Aside from useful it secures the connection from the client to the server and prevents unwanted tinkering. Anyone on the need of SSL (nowadays TLS) will benefit from this article but particularly will do those in […]
How to manage site visitors based on IP Geolocation
Whenever someone publishes a website on the internet, most of the times, their intention is that site to be seen around the globe. However, as a site administrator you may want to divert users from one country to visit some specific version of that site, maybe because of the visitor’s language. Other times, less often […]
Reasonable amount of enabled modules on Apache HTTP
CentOS Ubuntu FreeBSD core_module (static) core_module (static) core_module (static) so_module (static) so_module (static) so_module (static) http_module (static) watchdog_module (static) http_module (static) access_compat_module (shared) http_module (static) mpm_prefork_module (shared) actions_module (shared) log_config_module (static) authn_file_module (shared) alias_module (shared) logio_module (static) authn_core_module (shared) allowmethods_module (shared) version_module (static) authz_host_module (shared) auth_basic_module (shared) unixd_module (static) authz_groupfile_module (shared) auth_digest_module (shared) access_compat_module (shared) […]
How to install the Clamav antivirus on CentOS 8
Clamav is a free antivirus nowadays owned by Cisco and developed under the umbrella of the Talos-Intelligence group. Don’t be fooled by the word free, this is serious business. It supports a wide variety of operating systems from Windows to Linux-based ones as well as FreeBSD. Many companies are using other types of antivirus software […]
How to load and unload kernel modules in Linux
Kernel modules permit enabling hardware features on a given system. For example, if we need to read from a particular filesystem from a hard drive, we need to load a particular kernel module. Or use a specific network card, a sound card or sound device, a video display, etc. This is mostly done automatically in […]
How to work with Nessus scan results
Working with Nessus scan results is easy. How do I know that? Because I’ve worked with this tool for some time and although I do not know every corner of the things I’ve been doing some scans and solving quite a few deffects on systems that were labeled as ‘production ready’ when they clearly weren’t. […]